


With a Difference

by glioscarnach



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare
Genre: Other, all the horrible things present in the play basically you all know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-05
Updated: 2014-01-05
Packaged: 2018-01-07 15:15:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1121376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glioscarnach/pseuds/glioscarnach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because we need more cynical, politically-aware Ophelia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Walk Not i' th' Sun

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Act IV Scene V.  
> "There's rue for you; and here's some for me: we may call it herb of grace a' Sundays. You may wear your rue with a difference. "  
> Rue is a poison.

_HAMLET: For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion— Have you a daughter?_

_POLONIUS: I do indeed, my lord._

_HAMLET: Let her not walk i' th' sun. Conception is a blessing, but, as your daughter may conceive—Friend, look to ’t._

**Hamlet, Act II, Scene II: 181-186**

***

Ophelia walks the corridors, head bowed; not in prayer or supplication, but in thought. No other realm is free to her. Even here, in her echoing fortress home, there are chambers she cannot enter, passages she must not walk down, places where the wind whispers its discontents from deep within the cracked stone, where the walls scrape flesh from bone like scallop shells.

She will walk these paths in her madness, but not yet. For now she treads the tracks she has always trodden, wears away the flagstones with her familiar paces. She has heard of tigresses in their forests, and supposes they do the same; vicious-fanged habit holds until a snare is set.

 _Springes to catch woodcocks,_ she thinks, phantom of a smile on crimson-painted lips. _Father, do you think I bear the fluttering heart of a bird? How well have I concealed it._

Well might Polonius warn her now, and well might her brother- that primrose poison flows through their blood, and it has swept her along with it since time out of mind. It sweeps her now along the hallways, rushes through her mind with thoughts of blazing far-gone days.

 _Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,_ Laertes has cautioned. In his absence now she smirks. _In your experience, dear brother, quite so._ From all his talk of violets she knows he dwells still on the palace gardens, his own primy youth, Ophelia keeping watch, selectively deaf and tracing gilded orisons with a fingertip. Sun on the leaves and sighs in the air, and-

 _Unmastered importunity, indeed. Lord. As if I hadn’t guessed_ that _already._ She shakes her head now, smiling to herself. _There are some calumnious strokes,_ she reflects, _that I_ have _managed to escape._ Ophelia has always been one to look for the bright side of a bad situation. One learns these things, in Elsinore.

She is at her closet now; she takes the key from her bosom, turns it in the lock and puts it back, before the castle’s chill catches it. She shuts the door behind her, leaves it unlocked.

Her book of hours lies where she left it, abandoned in a puddle of sunshine. Her little white cat obscures the vellum, purring since her entrance. With a creak of wicker farthingale she bends to scoop it up, sits in the sunbeam herself, tosses the prayer book aside. It never tells her anything new.

 

The closet is small, and warm, with a comfortable layer of dust. The maid does not come in here anymore; the key is Ophelia’s alone. She cleaned it last some months ago, left lilies in the gilded vase on the windowsill. The sun has dried them frail as ashes, since: Ophelia dreads touching them, for fear they will crumble and their ghosts spill out into the empty suntrapped air.

The benches are all of red velvet, worn and scratched, scattered with little white hairs where Mousetrap has dozed. Its silver dish of water lies on the floor, half-full and clear as a mirror. There is a hole in the stonework by the door, the size of a child’s clenched fist. By this means, the kitchens and creatures of Elsinore are terrorised.

Ophelia teases the cat awhile, trailing a tapered sleeve before its face for it to bat at. Its green eyes narrow as it catches and gnaws on unsavoury velvet and emeralds. At last, it hops to the floor, regards her as one who has outlived her purpose. She is used to this, by now. It licks a paw, flicks an ear.

‘Fine, Mousetrap,’ she tells it, rolling her eyes. ‘I might as well sew.’

 

The design is one she began months ago, of doves and fat cherubs, bordering the blankness of what will be her central design. This remains to be seen. She works the needle in and out of the fine lawn, moulding a plump arm, feathering a pinion. It is dull work, and her mind wanders.

 _Breathing like sanctified and pious bawds, the better to beguile,_ her father’s words echo round her head, her eyes involuntarily landing on the mottled pearl rosary whose crucifix dangles, neglected, from the windowsill. Its last disturbance was likely Mousetrap’s lazy batting paw. _At least,_ she tells herself, _I do not sugar it over with lies, as some do. No more than is necessary, at least._

Mousetrap’s ears swivel in the corner of her eye, and Ophelia becomes conscious of a sound she did not know she was hearing. There are footsteps in the empty corridor, stirring up dust in the uncertain rhythm of one with a greater sense of self-righteousness than direction.    She groans inwardly. But no, the step is too light, too regular to be her father’s- it is outside the door now, and has stopped.

Mousetrap hisses, and skitters beneath her skirts as the door is shoved open.

 

Hamlet is a mess. Hamlet is, of course, always a mess: distracted student, mourning prince, perpetually inkstained and crumpled.

Today, however, he is notable even by his own low standards: the muppet’s clothes are all but hanging off him. If it were any other man, she might have been alarmed; instead, she makes a face.

‘Hamlet, what in Jesus’ name-‘

He’s looking at her as though she were a devil suddenly appeared to him, his eyes wide and mouth slack.

‘Close the door, for God’s love, no poor servant wants to see your arse,’ she snaps. She never bothered with titles in their childhood, and she’s damned if she’s going to with him in this state. _Well,_ says a sly voice she barely manages to keep internal, _there might be one servant in particular, but I daresay you’ve just arrived from his company._

He doesn’t move, doesn’t close the door, so she stands with decisive grace and reaches to do so herself - his hand catches her wrist, hard, before it can reach the doorknob.

‘ _My Lord,’_ she growls. ‘Let me _go_.’ With this she wrenches her arm away: hardly difficult, despite her condition. Scholars are not known for their strength.

She stays standing, sewing in hand to serve as sword and shield, and Mousetrap slithers from her skirts. In unison, they glare at the Prince, whose stockings are loose and spattered with black ink. His knobbly knees, she notes with a vague revulsion, are knocking together.

‘What a piece of work is a man,’ she mutters. Not a trace of his uncle in him, and more’s the pity. _‘Well?’_

He looks, if possible, more startled than before. As though he wasn’t used to her temper. She is faintly offended that he’s forgotten it. He wasn’t away that long.

‘What is your business here, Hamlet,’ she snaps, glaring with such ferocity that he starts. ‘Unless you wish to join me in my sewing? Talk of the handsomest courtiers? No?’

‘You are with child,’ he says it flatly, without emphasis. He looks absurdly betrayed.

‘Did Horatio tell you?’ he nods confirmation. ‘Bloody gossip.’

‘Is that all, my Lord? No other observations?’ she raises brows, forcing eye contact. ‘No?’

Hamlet’s still gawping, stare moving from her face to her still-flat stomach. _As if you’d never seen a woman before. Christ, Hamlet. What are you taught at that damned university?_

‘Whose?’ he manages. ‘Whose is it?’

 ‘O, yours of course, my dear,’ Ophelia smiles, pointedly opening the door. ‘It was quite the peck on the cheek, you know.’

She shoves him into the hallway, and locks the door against his questions.

 

She would like to pace, but decides it would be, as a gesture, too much like Hamlet. Besides, the closet is small, and she would only trip over the cat. Instead she sits, leans cheeks on knuckles, and sighs. _Bugger it all._

Erratic footsteps recede, and she is alone again. She straightens up, lifts her sewing to the meagre light. The cherubs are bulbous, the doves like carrion crows bleached bone-white. But the cloth is soft as skin, fine as flesh. Ophelia stabs the needle in, and marches out with rosary in hand.

Mousetrap curls in her empty seat, and twitches an ear at her faint and tearful cry.

‘O, my lord, my lord, I have been so affrighted!’

 

 

 


	2. You Sweet Heavens

‘Why, wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?’ he hisses the words out, and Ophelia would like to say, _well, as a matter of fact I would prefer not to be, no_. But he keeps talking, so she doesn’t say anything at all.

‘I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious…’ she nearly smiles at this; _certainly_ , she thinks, _you’re proud. But any ambition, surely, is to_ become _ambitious._

‘Strike me, madman,’ she whispers, painted lips unmoving. ‘Prove it.’

His pale eyes are wide with confusion, more than normal, for the split second it takes him to comprehend. Then he hits her, a girlish swipe across the face as he shouts ‘We are arrant knaves all!’ which in retrospect she thinks is far too theatrical. So is the way the blood streams down her face from the cuts his rings have made. So is the way she curls, gasping with falsified shock, on the floor. The baby’s kicking. Hamlet looks at her with badly-disguised guilt; she lets the blood drip down onto the marble floor as she stares at him through a curtain of loosed hair. _I’m damned,_ Ophelia thinks, _if I let you have all the drama. I’m damned anyway; I’ll be damned properly._

He’s talking again, and she isn’t listening; nothing new. She wonders if she’s the first person Hamlet’s ever hit. It seems likely. He’s not very good at it. Not compared, for instance, to his uncle.  There’s blood in her eyes, but she won’t wipe them, not now, because that would ruin the effect. The baby seems intent on kicking out her guts entirely; she feels weak, as though she’s being eaten up from both inside and out, by two angry, royal idiots. The child, she is suddenly sure, will be a boy. If he is anything.

‘Where’s your father?’ he’s saying it slowly, as though reading it aloud. She wishes he would go away, end the tiresome scene, let the curtain drop on them both.

He says it again, raises his hand a fraction. Steps forward. Ophelia raises her face, teeth bared in attack or defence, she isn’t sure. She grabs at a table, hauls herself to her feet. Only her hands shake: she sees with satisfaction that his are shaking more.

‘At home,’ she spits out. And, since she does still love him, since she needs him to hit her so her father can see it, she adds ‘My lord’ in Horatio’s love-lorn provincial tones. She smiles at his shocked face, and tastes the blood in her teeth. ‘O, Hamlet,’ she whispers in her own voice. ‘Do not think I’ve not seen.'

‘Let the doors be shut upon him,’ says Hamlet slowly, and she’s confused for a moment before realising it’s a reply: the doors are not shut to her. Wonder of wonders, he understands her meaning now. She does not smile, but looks steadily at him.

She’s thinking: _hit me again, and I’ll fall, and maybe I’ll lose it, please God let me-_ And he does, a lazy, sweeping blow of the whole arm as he steps away from her; it could almost be a movement from a dance. Something else she was always better at.

She wants to fall hard, but self-protection wins out; she curls again, around her hated, swelling, precious belly. The baby has stopped kicking; Hamlet has stopped talking, for once in his life, but he’s making no more moves toward exit. Ophelia has this delirious idea, suddenly, that they’re sizing each other up; her two boys, her two unwanted little men, wanting her attention, wanting to put more bruises in her flesh and spirit.

‘O, help him,’ she whispers, unsure who exactly she’s talking about, if the tears in her eyes are true any more. ‘You sweet heavens.’

‘If thou dost marry,’ Hamlet is saying, crouched down beside her. ‘I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry…’ Ophelia smiles; she has plague enough for the world entire, if she only let it go free.

‘Thou shalt not escape calumny,’ he’s telling her now. As though she didn’t know already. _Nobody does,_ she thinks. _You bloody fool, don’t you know that by now?_

He says ‘farewell’ a second time. The baby starts kicking again, more vicious than before. And she murmurs, too tired for bitterness, ‘O heavenly powers, restore him!’ To stillness, she means, and she means the brat. But Hamlet takes this as a cue to turn back to her, jerk her to her feet. _Much more of this,_ she thinks, _and I’ll hit him myself, and let the plan go hang._                

‘I have heard of your paintings,’ he tells her, gripping her upper arms as though he were a real madman. A flicker of fear: _what if he is?_

He’s staring at the scratches on her face, the blood and tears striped across her cheeks; is this what he means by ‘paintings’? He looks as though he has no idea how they got there.  He shakes her, hard, and her head bobbles around like a kitten’s with its neck wrung. As though he’s never made a bad decision.

She feels like saying this; but his eyes have gone very wide and very pale, and don’t see her: fighting Hamlet would be a waste of time. She feels like her skin has turned to lead, her bones to glass: if she falls, they’ll all shatter to shards inside her, but nobody will be able to see.

‘To a nunnery, go,’ his voice is suddenly soft, and she wants to claw the pity out of his eyes. _God, Hamlet. You think I’ve not thought of that before?_

Her face, she knows, is blank, slack, sticky with salt. He keeps his eyes on hers, which aren’t so much angry any more as exasperated, tired. The moment stretches. Then: ‘Go yourself, why don’t you?’

He does go, then, and if it really _were_ to a nunnery she wouldn’t be surprised. She gets the impression that she’s frightened him a little. She nurtures this idea: more than anything, now, she would dearly love to be feared. She used to crave desire, but she got enough of that, and much good it did her.

She hasn’t fallen over, Ophelia notices: and she still has her little Book of Hours. Blood on its blue silk cover. She sways, lets it fall at her feet. She is silent, but later Horatio’s chronicle will give her a nice speech, relating to Hamlet’s former virtues. She just hopes he reads the letters.

Her father has emerged, and the King. They both look firmly away from her belly, as always. Claudius doesn’t look at her at all. He’s talking about Hamlet; she doesn’t listen. She’s sick of everybody talking about Hamlet. Better than talking about her, perhaps; but then the infamy of carrying the King’s bastard might be enjoyable. Polonius fusses around her, expresses his horror at Hamlet’s brutality. _Then why didn’t you help me, Father? If you’re so concerned._

Ophelia lets the men lead her away. The baby kicks her. She thinks: _I’ll call him Hamlet. The little bastard._


	3. The Poison of Deep Grief

**_KING_ ** _: O, this is the poison of deep grief; it springs all from her father's death—_

**Hamlet, Act IV, Scene V:  75-6**

***

Ophelia scuffs her red shoes grey as she roams the empty halls at dawn and dusk, dancing to a rhythm that lives in her own mind.

She wears her mourning black, and walks the castle walls by night, singing high songs of low deeds, learned from her lover long lost, her lady’s maid and her sharp-eared listening in on the guards. Who pays heed to a madwoman? Less, a mad _girl_? She has not the distinction that comes with age. _Nor the wisdom,_ she supposes. _But few enough have that._

She knows of the ghost, of course. Guards do gossip, and with shoes in hand she walks quiet enough to hear. Quiet enough to slip away, let loose a shriek from the ramparts minutes later, watch them stumble from their posts, full of ale and terror.

She quite enjoys being the mad girl, at such times as these.

 

At daybreak she goes to chapel, sits behind the King and Queen and taps rhythms out on prayerbooks all through the Mass. She giggles through the gospels; twists flowers through the greying gold columns of Gertrude’s braids. _They are not covered_ , she reasons. _You cannot wear both mantilla and crown._

Mousetrap follows her steps now, covers her black velvet over with white. They doze in her closet by day, or Ophelia digs needles into cushions, imagines the resistance of flesh. She wonders why she has no ghosts, no visitors. Wonders why her brother is so long in coming, if he will come at all. Perhaps he is relieved as she, lounging languid in the peace of the fatherless. _Ah, but he had that already. He has ever outpaced me. Intemperate boy._

These, she knows, are her final weeks, her final days. She looks to sea and sees the burning masts of ships in the eyes of her mind, come to claim her for their own. _I am forged from flame,_ she whispers to the wind, _and I will join you soon._

Yet she is heavy with sleep, heavy with hopelessness, and lacks all urgency. There is nothing to be done; nothing can be altered. She has seen the last hours of this court, mapped in the tapestries of fever-dreams, and she looks at the eyes of the helpless players, to see if they know it too. Claudius’ are clouded and green as sea-glass; what once she took for mystery she sees now as but a fine-clothed fear, the fury of the younger child forever pushed aside.

She would write a last confession, if any would read it. Would write it in blood, and not her own. _I killed a King; lay with his brother. I weave the sorrows of my home, I am a phantom long before I die. I am the snake that bites in the orchard, I am the mother who will drown in the sunshine. I see death come to all I know, and I smile to see it. Fear me._

 

She gives up on sleep, for the blood gushes through her dreams, steams through the orchard snow. She sings and sews, crouched in the casemates where no soul goes. Horatio is her keeper; he told her so himself and met her sugar-blacked snarl. ‘Your business is with the Prince, not me,’ she hissed, and has not seen him since.

Ophelia takes red thread, sews a thousand beading seams of blood onto her skirt, her sleeves and headdress. In the night it all dims to black; in the night blood does not shine so bright as the ships on the horizon drawing closer, as the lightning dripping down the sky toward her waiting body, flesh and bone.

 

She sings shrill in the great hall where the fires burn, sings high of her follies and her lover’s sins. A great song and dance, and Gertrude’s ladies titter and stare at her hand-sewn wounds, her mind-sewn wildness. _I am a warning, sweet ladies: heed me well._

 ‘My brother shall know of it,’ she promises the King, head lowered as a pouncing cat. Then a swirl of dust and needle-torn kirtle, and she is beyond his grasp again, bidding the ladies goodnight, lips cracked and grinning, Horatio on her heels.

 

‘Fare you well, my dove,’ her tears come with the raging blankness in her brother’s eyes, blue-grey mirror to her own. She does not let them fall. _He does not see, he will not see, he shall not know._

_Had I my wits, brother? O, had I a dagger, I would take out the sense and virtue of those eyes myself._

But she has no dagger; God knows if she had, she would have used it long ago. She knows how. _Far simpler,_ she thinks, _than sewing. And more permanent._

‘Pray you, love, _remember_ ,’ her whisper is harsh, making the soft words ugly. She has no flowers: has crushed their sap in a killing dose. Tansy and rue, parsley and columbine, swallowed with wine and dark honey as she sat and watched the dawn.

 _Would that I could share that drink with you, my love._ She turns blurring eyes to the King, who stands uneasy, two sword’s lengths from her weeping brother. _You always were a coward. Look at me, look for once at one who you have killed. Always I am left to clear your messes._

‘O,’ she draws close to Claudius, reaches for his hand and clasps it, revels in the widening of his eyes as her ragged nails scrape the skin. ‘You must wear your rue with a difference.’

She kisses him, harsh and bitter; he is shocked enough to get the taste of poison before she is thrust away, cackling and full with false delight.

_O love, now you are ashamed? Now you are afraid? Now you have the taste of death on tongue and tooth?_

‘There’s a daisy!’ she plucks the wilting thing from her brother’s cap. _You’ll need more than that, to patch our father’s wounds._ From her sleeve to his pocket slips the half-empty vial; she will use this chance, for there will not be another. She wills the light of comprehension into her brother’s slow-burning brain.

‘Use it well,’ she mouths. _Please God, use it well._

Her dirge then sung, her last farewell, she departs without a look behind, walks unshivering to the garden as she knows she must, where the sun shines on the water and the blood boils forgotten in the earth. Here will she lay her head, her bones.

_It is not for love I die, not for mercy’s promise. But I must end your line, I must end my own. This is no world, love, for the killers of kings. And I can do no more but that. I can do no more._

Her mind’s lightening cracks the sky, and the burning ships all drift to shore.


End file.
